10 Performance Marketing Strategies That Actually Work

7 Min Read

These days, digital marketing is a way of life. Companies across the world have budgeted more of their marketing dollars for online video advertising, social media, and other digital channels over the past few years. While some of these efforts are aimed at generating organic traffic in which people stumble on your brand through internet searches, others are created for specific results, which is known as performance marketing.

Today, we’ll discuss the critical steps you need to take for a successful performance marketing strategy.

What Is Performance Marketing?

Performance marketing is a results-driven approach where advertisers pay only for specific actions such as leads, sales, or clicks. It allows real-time tracking and optimization of campaigns, ensuring high efficiency and return on investment.

In other words, performance marketing focuses on measurable outcomes, making it easier to calculate ROI and adjust strategies accordingly.

Benefits of a Performance Marketing Strategy

What are the advantages of performance marketing? Here are the top benefits one can expect from implementing a performance marketing strategy:

• Cost Efficiency: Advertisers only pay for successful transactions such as leads, sales, or clicks, reducing marketing costs and increasing ROI.
• Real-Time Optimization: Campaigns can be tracked and optimized in real-time, allowing for adjustments that improve performance immediately.
• Precise Targeting: Highly targeted campaigns reach specific audiences based on demographics, interests, location, and behavior, enhancing effectiveness.
• Wide Platform Reach: Businesses can engage potential customers across multiple platforms including social media, search engines, email, and mobile apps.
• Low Risk and Scalability: Payment is only made for completed actions, minimizing risk. Campaigns can also be easily scaled up or down according to business needs and budgets.

Now, how about the strategies themselves? Follow these steps to create a successful performance marketing strategy.

1. Define Your Campaign Message

Before launching any performance marketing campaign, you need a clear, compelling message that aligns with your goals. Whether you’re driving brand awareness, increasing conversions, or generating leads, your messaging should resonate with your audience and inspire action.

Why It’s Important

A well-defined campaign message creates consistency across all marketing efforts, ensuring your ads, landing pages, and creatives work together seamlessly. It also helps you craft stronger calls to action (CTAs) that drive engagement and conversions.

2. Establish Your Brand Positioning

Your brand positioning defines how you want your audience to perceive your company in the market. This includes highlighting what makes you unique—whether it’s superior customer service, competitive pricing, or solving key customer pain points.

Why It’s Important

Strong brand positioning differentiates you from competitors and attracts the right audience. It also helps refine your messaging and ensures that your marketing efforts align with your core value proposition.

3. Set Performance Targets

Performance marketing is all about measurable marketing metrics, so setting clear KPIs is essential. Whether your goal is to boost website traffic, increase conversions, or lower customer acquisition costs, having defined targets allows you to track progress and optimize accordingly.

Why It’s Important

Without performance benchmarks, it’s difficult to assess whether your campaign is truly effective. Setting KPIs also provides insights for future campaigns, allowing you to refine strategies and allocate budget more efficiently.

4. Choose the Right Channel Mix

Your audience is spread across multiple digital platforms, so using a multi-channel approach maximizes your reach. Research where your target audience spends time and prioritize ad spend on the most effective performance marketing channels for engagement.

Why It’s Important

Diversifying your marketing mix ensures that you’re reaching the right people at the right time. Even though performance marketing is results-driven, choosing the right channels improves efficiency and maximizes ROI.

5. Optimize Your Website for Conversions

A high-performing website is essential to turn ad clicks into meaningful actions. Make sure your site is optimized for speed, mobile responsiveness, and seamless navigation, and ensure your landing pages align with your campaign goals.

Why It’s Important

A slow, confusing website can drive away potential customers before they convert. Optimizing your site improves user experience, reduces bounce rates, and increases the chances of turning traffic into leads or sales.

6. Develop and Launch Your Campaign

Once your strategy, messaging, and channels are in place, it’s time to execute. Create high-quality ad creatives, including videos, graphics, and copy, and ensure they are optimized for each marketing platform.

Why It’s Important

Launching a campaign with tailored, well-designed creatives increases engagement and improves ad performance. When ads are optimized for specific platforms, they resonate better with the audience and drive stronger results.

7. Track Performance and Optimize

Performance marketing isn’t a set-it-and-forget-it approach—it requires ongoing analysis and refinement. By tracking key metrics and running A/B tests, you can adjust messaging, targeting, and creative elements to improve performance.

Why It’s Important

Continuous optimization helps eliminate underperforming ads and allocate budget to high-performing channels. Learning from real-time data ensures your campaign delivers maximum impact and informs smarter decisions for future marketing efforts.

8. Leverage AI for Smarter Targeting

Artificial intelligence (AI) can analyze user behavior, engagement trends, and intent signals to refine your ad targeting. By using AI-driven audience segmentation, brands can predict which prospects are most likely to convert and adjust bidding strategies accordingly.

Why It’s Important

Traditional targeting methods rely on historical data and broad audience segments, which can lead to wasted ad spend. AI enables real-time optimizations, ensuring your ads reach high-intent users at the right moment for better conversion rates.

9. Personalize Ad Experiences

Generic ads no longer cut it—today’s consumers expect customized experiences tailored to their needs and interests. Dynamic ad creative, personalized messaging and tailored offers help brands deliver relevant content that resonates with each individual user.

Why It’s Important

Personalized ads create a stronger emotional connection with your audience, leading to higher engagement and better conversion rates. By adjusting ad creative based on demographics, behavior, or past interactions, brands can increase relevancy and drive better results.

10. Implement Cross-Device Retargeting

B2B and B2C buyers rarely convert after a single touchpoint, making cross-device retargeting essential. By tracking user interactions across Connected TV (CTV), desktop, mobile, and social, brands can serve sequential messaging to nurture leads through multiple stages of the funnel.

Why It’s Important

Consumers often switch between multiple devices before making a purchase decision and failing to retarget across platforms results in lost opportunities. Cross-device retargeting keeps your brand top-of-mind and increases the likelihood of conversion by reinforcing your message across channels.

Why Your Performance Marketing Strategy Needs CTV

Want to run streaming advertising campaigns that deliver real, measurable results? MNTN’s platform brings performance marketing to CTV, combining precise audience targeting, automated optimization, and real-time attribution to ensure every ad drives impact. Whether you’re focused on conversions, site traffic, or brand lift, you stay in control of your success.

Here’s what you get with MNTN Performance TV:

• MNTN Matched – AI-driven targeting finds high-intent audiences based on behavior, demographics, and purchase signals.
• Premium CTV Inventory – Get guaranteed ad placements on top streaming networks where engaged viewers are actively watching.
• Verified Visits™ Attribution – Tracks site visits and conversions tied directly to ad exposure, providing clear performance insights.
• Automated Optimization – AI continuously fine-tunes your OTT marketing campaign in real time to maximize efficiency and return on ad spend.
• Reporting Suite – Access real-time performance data to track engagement, optimize campaigns, and prove ROI.

Put performance-driven CTV advertising to work—sign up today to launch your campaign with MNTN’s self-serve software.

Performance Marketing Strategies: Final Thoughts

A strong performance marketing strategy starts with clear goals, precise targeting, and data-driven optimization to maximize results. Video marketing—especially on CTV and OTT—enhances engagement and expands your reach beyond what text-based ads can achieve. If you’re ready to elevate your campaigns, MNTN’s performance-driven CTV platform offers premium targeting, real-time attribution, and in-depth reporting to help you scale with confidence.

Want a Closer Look?

Discover how Performance TV delivers revenue, conversions and more through the power of Connected TV. Request a demo today to speak to an expert.